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My computer pinged as an email entered my inbox notifying me that I had a message on an online dating site. I logged into the site and was pleasantly surprised at what I found.

He was 43, looked fairly fit, appeared to be self sufficient and sounded relatively interesting. This had to be worth a try. After a while internet dating has a tendency to become a bit of a drag, it is hard to sort the wheat from the chaff and most emails I get go straight into the delete box.

A few emails later telephone numbers were exchanged and he was soon on the phone. Our first conversation went well. I liked how he sounded and we chatted easily for a good while. In our next conversation he was a little full on, a bit too eager for my liking and I found myself telling him he needed to calm down or he would frighten me off. I was still interested but was beginning to feel cautious, he talked a lot and it didn’t appear to be down to nerves. However, he was new to the ‘scene’ so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided he was just over eager.

We met for coffee and I was relieved to find that he didn’t give me any psycho vibes. He was quite relaxed and we quite quickly got into conversation. It wasn’t long before I realised that we weren’t compatible. I’m not sure if it was that he thought he should get a tax break for privately educating his child and having private healthcare or because towards the end of our second coffee he still didn’t know anything about me, but the signs were growing! I asked him about an emblem on his top and he looked at me disparagingly and said “I’m clad head to toe in Vivienne Westwood”. If I had any doubt that put it too bed and I knew that there would be no second date with this fella.

To be fair the date wasn’t boring like many I’ve been on. We did in fact have quite stimulating conversation as I challenged his views but nothing had prepared me for his next clanger. He was telling me about the sport he participates in and said that he loved his food and put on weight easily so it was important to him to get in lots of exercise to prevent this. He then said he was very annoyed with obese people, he couldn’t understand how they could let themselves get that way. He questioned why they didn’t reach a point where they could see they were getting to an unacceptable weight and do something about it. I suggested that obesity was a complex issue and there might be many reasons why a person had become overweight and struggle to lose it. He didn’t acknowledge this and went on to moan a bit more about obesity, finally declaring “and to top it all it’s our hard earned tax payers money that ends up having to foot the medical bills for their greed”. It was all I could do not to choke on my latte, not quite believing what I was hearing.

I challenged his views, asked him if he felt the same way about people who drank and smoked, or people who received cancer treatment when the cancer was caused by lifestyle choice. He wasn’t able to make the comparison. It was quite obvious to me at this point that there was no more to be said, the date was over. We left the coffee shop and I thanked him for the date and said I was off to get a bus home.

He indignantly exclaimed that he would take it from that I wasn’t interested in pursuing things further. I asked him how he thought things had gone and he said that he thought it had gone well and he knew that he was happy to take things further. I laughed and said that part of the difficulty was that it was all about him, I wasn’t sure how much he really knew about me because he hadn’t actually taken any interest in me. He said he knew that I liked to argue and that he wanted to kiss me. Before I realised what was happening he had moved in for the kiss and would you believe he was a ‘slobber’, the worse I had experienced for some time. It was revolting, like someone drooling into my mouth.

I pushed him away from me and asked him what he thought he was doing. Without waiting for an answer I declared that I was one of those fat people he really hated who put a burden on the NHS by having weight loss surgery and I was off to get my bus. I turned on my heel and didn’t look back, pleased to find the bus was there for me to get straight on to.

So it’s back to the dating sites and single events to continue the search for someone; and in the meantime scrabble friend is coming up at the w.e to play and that’s good enough for now!

The implication being that to lose weight through weight loss surgery (WLS) is somehow wrong, or a way of cheating. That unless you lose weight the conventional way you are somehow ‘less’ of a person, excuse the pun! This is of course ridiculous and yet I do understand why people think this way, as I was guilty of it too until I learned to understand the complexity of obesity. The media have a tendency to glorify convention and vilify those who choose alternative routes to achieve the same result.

I can liken WLS to the X Factor; some people embrace the format as a way to showcase talent that might otherwise be undiscovered, while others see it as a shortcut to fame without all the hard graft to get there. People like to see someone work to overcome their struggle, it gives us hope and encouragement. Unfortunately this works the other way round too and we like to see people continue to struggle with their difficulties because it can help us feel better about our own. In the end of course, those who have real talent and appeal make it and those who don’t, don’t, even if they end up winning a competition like the X Factor! It is also true to say that however they get there, hard graft is always involved.

WLS will work for those people who are determined to change their lifestyles and overcome their eating issues, it is an alternative way of achieving the desired result but it comes with it’s own challenges and is not an easy option and is by no means cheating.

There is nothing easy about putting yourself through major surgery, having your insides rearranged with the knowledge that you will never be able to use food in the same way again. People take painkillers to relieve themselves from pain. Why is weight loss surgery any different? It is a medical intervention to address a problem that I for one wasn’t able to cure on my own. I needed help, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try hard I really did, nothing was successful. I would lose weight but never enough and I would always put it back on again. I was trapped inside myself and in a vicious cycle that was slowly killing me. I owe my life to this weight loss tool.

I admire people who are comfortable with their size whatever that may be. I admire people who have been able to lose significant amounts of weight through calorie counting and exercise. I also admire people who have been able to say how unhappy their weight makes them and seek help to change this – be it through hypnosis, personal training, a specialised diet, weight loss surgery or any other means; whatever works for you. No option is an easy option and is certainly not a way of ‘cheating’; losing weight is a difficult accomplishment no matter how it is achieved. I may not be much of an X Factor fan but I do feel like a winner!

“Hello darkness my old friend, Ive come to talk with you again”
Simon and Garfunkel

I haven’t always had a term for how I feel, that came later in life, but for as long as I can remember I’ve had periods where life has just felt so pointless that I’ve struggled to understand why I continue to exist. As a young child it was connected to life in the family and the difficulty I felt in sometimes fitting in and feeling I belonged. In my teens it got worse as I found it hard to process some of my experiences, significantly the sexual abuse at the hands of my grandfather. I took comfort in food which of course meant putting on weight and this in turn made me feel more depressed. In adolescence it is accepted that there are going to be times when you are moody and feel hopeless so nobody paid much attention to the fact that I was unhappy and never knew there were times when I seriously considered ending my life.

As I got older I learned to hide my sadness and believing that nobody likes a misery-guts I became quite a functional depressive. I realised that I as much as I felt that I didn’t want to exist, I wasn’t going to end my life so I needed to find a way to live with my feelings. I also knew I couldn’t continue to suppress my feelings with weed and food as it was slowly killing me. This is what brought me into therapy.

Therapy isn’t for everyone and I don’t believe it is the only or best way to deal with difficulties, but it has been of great help to me. There are many different therapeutic approaches, I chose psychoanalysis as for me it seemed to fit with what I needed. My therapist named what I was going through as depression and helped me understand how I had got there and what I could do to manage it.

I have worked hard at processing my experiences and this has certainly helped with the depression but I fear I will never truly be free of it. It seems to linger in the dark recess of my mind and rears its ugly head every now and then, as if to remind me of what was. The difference now is that when that dark cloud settles over me and I wonder why I bother with life feeling as though nothing will ever be different, I am able to remind myself it is only a feeling and it will pass. In the depth of despair it is hard to remember this and I am grateful to my therapist for reminding me and helping me to remember that there are times when I don’t feel that way because depression can make me forget and I think that is all I know how to feel.

The feeling of being morbidly obese has been with me for as long as I can remember, I do not recall a time when I felt comfortable in my body. I feel like I have been overweight all my life, but can look back at me as a child and see that I was not as overweight as I believed, however I was still overweight and it was this burden that I carried around with me.

I remember as a young child feeling that I wasn’t good enough for my parents. I am the middle of three and always seemed to be at odds with everyone. My mother saw everything she hated about herself in me and everything she loved about herself in my sister. I believe she meant well but she didn’t parent me well. She was critical, believed in being cruel to be kind; didn’t prevent my brother from bullying me and most of the time she couldn’t bring herself to talk to me. She was always worried about how fat I was and how repulsed people would be by me. I did get some love from my mother, sometimes she felt like my biggest supporter but other times she was my harshest critic, which confused me. I felt enormous, different from all my peers. I look back now and realise that this was just how my mother perceived me and that it wasn’t really true. I wonder how things might have been different if I had been encouraged to love and care for my body, been made to feel like I was of worth. Where was my father in all this? He was around but worked long hours and was more of a peripheral figure. When he did engage with us it was fun, although you never wanted to be on the wrong side of him as he could be scary! The family he came from was pretty screwed up and he bears the scars of this, as we all do in our own way, the sins of the father and all that! We were a family of secrets and lies, where things got brushed under the carpet and all that mattered is how we were perceived by those outside of us.

I experienced some difficult situations as a child / young person that impacted significantly on my life. As a result of not being able to process what happened to me and having little support, I ate away my sorrow, despair, self-hate, confusion and every other emotion that came my way.

I dieted and lost weight all my life, only to put it back on again and never getting to a weight that I felt comfortable at. My first weight watchers meeting was at 10 years old and since then I have tried every diet going, some with more success than others but never reaching a weight I was happy with and ultimately always putting the lost weight back on again. As I approached my 30th birthday, in my head a childhood landmark, I knew that I had to make some changes in my life or I was going to be unhappy forever.

As an unhappy child I had told myself that if nothing had changed by the time I was 30 then I should kill myself as in my eyes my life would be over and I would have failed to achieve anything. 2001, approaching 30, I felt like I was in the same place emotionally, full of self loathing and dissatisfied with my life. However, age is a wonderful thing and as unhappy as I was I also recognised that there was much about life I enjoyed and that as I got older the less I remember what made me so unhappy and the more I understood that I was in control of my life and could make the changes I wanted, but for some reason I wasn’t doing that. It was for this reason that I found myself in therapy and for the first time started to talk about myself, my feelings, things that had happened to me in my life, what I wanted to happen to me, what I was angry about, what I was afraid of and most importantly how I could take small steps to change my life and start to accept myself for who I am. I worked hard to understand my eating habits but they had become so entrenched that it was hard to break them. Food is also a difficult habit to break; you can’t just give it up as you need it to live, so it is always around you. Weight loss is a long hard process, so even when you are feeling emotionally strong and that you have made changes in your life, the weight is still there as a reminder of what you were and how far you still have to go. This predicament makes it so hard; frustration and disappointment are never far away and however successful you have been there is still so much more weight to lose. It feels as if you have got nowhere and this sometimes made everything seem very dark and bleak.

In 2007 my therapist talked to me about going to see my GP and talking to them about how depressed I was feeling. Although she didn’t promote the use of medication she strongly felt that at times it was necessary and this was one of those times. I had been talking a lot about childhood experiences and understanding the impact they had on me, I was moving on emotionally but so stuck with my weight that I couldn’t see how healing my emotional scars was ever going to help because I had done too much damage to my body that I would always bear the burden. Finally I listened to what she told me and understood that only I had the control to help myself but if I reached out there were people there to hold my hand and give me the support I needed.

I went to see my GP. I didn’t have a relationship with any of them, was happy to just see the first available and pleased to hear it was woman. Fate must have had a hand because I met a wonderful GP who seemed to understand the difficulties I was having and didn’t judge me for my weight. We discussed why I was there and she agreed that some anti-depressant might be helpful but also asked me to make an appointment to see her once a month. As she got to know me better she broached the subject of my weight and it all came out, about how it had been my burden all my life and that I couldn’t see a way to fix myself while I was so overweight but I couldn’t never lose it all and I felt like it was in a vicious cycle with no way out. The GP incredibly understood and we set about trying some of the weight loss medication that is around. The impact was the same, weight was lost but it was slow and soon the motivation waned. I had stopped the emotional eating but it was still difficult to lose weight and the prospect seemed so impossible that it was hard not to feel depressed.

One day she said she just wanted to take the problem away from me, she felt that it had been difficult for so long and that if only she could remove it I would be able to renew my energy for life. She suggested that I would be a good candidate for weight loss surgery and wanted to know what I thought. I can honestly say that this was not something I had ever considered, I didn’t really know much about it but my immediate thoughts were of people having their jaws wired shut or stomach’s stapled and my initial reaction was of horror and to say no. I felt like a failure, that I was somehow cheating and didn’t deserve that help because I hadn’t managed to lose weight like other people. The GP challenged my thinking, suggested that there were many different paths to the same goal and who was to say I had to take the conventional one. This appealed to me as I have always enjoyed toying with convention and going against the grain. She asked me to consider just going to meet the consultants and see what they had to say, and this I agreed to.

The meeting was very positive, the consultant had enormous insight into obesity. We discussed my past and present eating habits, looked at my weight history and discussed the psychological issues that are associated with eating disorders. He informed me that because I had put all the weight on as a teenager he didn’t think it would be possible for me to lose it in the conventional manner by diet and exercise alone; I realised that surgery was possibly the only option for me if I was serious about losing weight.

Following the initial consultation there was a series of other meetings that I had to have, including a psychological assessment. Everyone in the medical team was keen to emphasise that the surgery was a tool that would help me to achieve the weight lost I needed but would not fix everything and that I had to make a lifelong commitment to maintaining the weight loss. Then suddenly, two years on from the initial consultation the time for surgery had arrived. Prior to the operation I was only able to drink milk for 10 days in order to shrink my liver so that keyhole surgery could be undertaken. It was like cleansing my body before surgery and following the operation I would go through a period of taking liquid only, then puree food, soft food and finally onto solids. The experience was a kind of re-birthing for me an opportunity to start over!

June 30th 2009 I had a gastric bypass and it saved my life. Once the operation was done and I was well again I allowed myself to get excited about what was to come and how different my life was going to be. I imagined going on holiday and not feeling anxious about fitting in the airplane seat or doing the belt up; shopping in regular clothes shops without thinking everyone is staring at me wondering why I’m in there; going out with my friends and not feeling like I stand out for all the wrong reasons; not worrying about what I’m sitting on and whether it will hold my weight!

Within a year I had lost a significant amount of weight and stopped feeling like I was different to everyone, that I was wearing my problems for the world to see and I started living. In my eyes I looked more normal, fitted in with the rest of society. I loved being able to buy clothes from wherever I chose, trying on friends clothes and seeing myself as a feminine woman for the first time in years. The aspect of the weight loss I found difficult was the excess skin. I was lucky in that most of my skin retracted enough for it not to be too problematic, but the belly area didn’t appear to change at all. I could see that my belly had dropped but I struggled to see it as excess skin, it looked like a big fat wobbly belly to me and was something that made me feel like I was still exceedingly overweight. In clothes all was good and I felt nice, out of clothes it was as if nothing had changed.

One of the most important parts of losing weight has been adjusting my thinking and behaviour, on so many levels. I’ve had to look at my relationship with food, understand why I felt the need to eat all the time and find different ways of managing myself. I’ve also had to accept that I’m no longer viewed by others as overweight and so need to stop thinking of myself in that way. I don’t imagine I’ll ever not feel fat but hopefully it won’t dominate my thinking so much or prevent me from trying new things or living life the way I want to.

Two years on and ten stone lighter I have just had a lower body lift to remove the excess skin from around the belly and tidy up the thighs, buttocks and mons. Although I’m still early into recovery I can am pleased with the difference it has made to my buttocks and mons and can’t believe how much better my belly looks. I still have a muffin top that is a little out of proportion but I’m hoping it will settle down somewhat or I may need to have some further work done down the line. Now, however, I need to adjust to what I have had done and get back to living my life!